


Dead Hearts

by Echinoderma



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-02
Updated: 2011-11-02
Packaged: 2017-10-25 15:32:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Echinoderma/pseuds/Echinoderma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. It was just her luck, to get sick on her birthday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Hearts

**Author's Note:**

> this is  
> ugh  
> I can't look at this anymore.  
> Scratched universe AU.
> 
> (The song is [Dead Hearts ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfYK8wvvU90)by Stars)

 

                Rose Lalonde lived an uneventful life in a spacious condo with her loquacious brother and elegant mother, occasionally intruded upon by her vagabond father. She excelled at school and devoured knowledge like a snake, swallowing concepts, ideas, diagrams whole and letting them digest for days in her mental stomach. She had comebacks that snapped like whipcracks against the fragile egos of her peers, observations that skipped the civilized veneer of society to strike at the unguarded soul. Hard to impress, even harder to tolerate, she drifted through life alone; her gossamer form passing quietly from one day to another.

                There was an aura about her, something that darkened the rooms she entered, that dampened the moods of those she came in contact with.

                On her thirteenth birthday, she became ill.

 

\-------------

I.

                It started with a fever.

                She was pale and waifish, but her immune system was hardy, and she was surprised at the intensity of her sickness. The fever crept upon her like an assassin, unknown until it struck and sabotaged her tireless work ethic and left it lying somewhere in a ditch. She laid in her bed, skin infection hot, drenched in sweat and shivering in the false chill under the covers. The illness ravaged her, leaving her too weak to even stand. The doctors fretted over her condition, no trace of bacteria or virus in her system, no drugs or poisons, nothing to explain the wracking coughs and the shakes that made her look like junkie going though withdrawal. So she stayed home, adrift endlessly in the sluggish sea of time, falling in and out of consciousness as she rested.

                On the third day, she dreamed.

                Thick, oozing darkness slid against her face in lazy tendrils; her skin sloughed off after the contact to reveal the tight cords of muscle underneath. It left blisters, welts, sores, abscesses in its wake, the black seeped into her flesh and bone, staining her from the outside in. Rose opened her mouth to scream, but instead, a stream of sludge, pitch-black with an oil sheen and riddled with tiny fragments of bone, spewed from her mouth and splattered to the rough ground on which she stood. Blood washed the slime away, her mouth sliced to ribbons by the abrasive filth. Voices, she realized, rang in the endless void before her. Something was trying to speak with her, but when she strained her ears to listen she heard only gibberish, thick, consonant-heavy words that slithered and writhed into her head and slipped under her skin and when she clasped her hands to her ears to block them out they were only magnified, growing impatient and angry with her defiance. When she removed them, her hands came back slick with black and purple and she turned her head skyward to look into the jaundiced eye of a demon, the slitted pupil of a malevolent god.

                She came to in whirl of red and the echo of the crunch of her bones rattling in her skull. She'd barely taken a breath before she rolled to the side of the bed and vomited.

                _They had lights inside their eyes._

 _They had lights inside their eyes._

\-------------

II.

                "Your immune system slumming it with the gypsies or something? You've been gettin' sick a lot lately." Dave snipped from across the room, chair tilted back, feet propped on a dresser.

                "I continue to be floored by the incompetence of the 'professionals' that have been treating me. They don't know what's wrong."  Rose croaked from under the covers. "They say my immune system is perfectly functional, no trace of illness in my body."

                His snort didn't quite reach his mouth, lodging itself in his throat as he fidgeted with the hem of his sleeves.

                " Doctor Scratch says it's because I'm 'stressed'. Like I'm some impulsive child who can't manage their time or sort out their priorities. As if I have anything to be stressed about. These pompous, overbearing imbeciles, can't even do something they spend thousands of dollars and decades of their lives learning-"

                "Who's John?"

                She stops mid-sentence, the words evaporating in the sudden wave of heat that courses through her body. Her body is tight, every muscle gone rigid, contracting like they wanted to crush her skeleton into a fine powder.

                "You talk in your sleep sometimes. " Dave shrugged. "That one comes up a lot."

                Rose opens her mouth to speak but finds that her lexicon has deserted her, her vocabulary shriveled and regressed to infancy; she can only force meaningless babble from her aching vocal chords.

                "...Rose?"

                "Do I mention anyone else?"

                Dave side-eyed her from behind his aviators (sunglasses indoors, her brother was a ridiculous, ridiculous person).

                "Yeah, sometimes. Aradia. Jade. Kanaya." The names rolled unfamiliarly off his tongue. "You got a harem or something you're not telling me about? I knew you went for a more feminine audience, Sis. No wonder you shot down every boy who'd ever asked you out with that buckshot vernacular of yours."

                "Is that it?"

                "Aside from the creepy eldritch mumbling, yeah. You gonna tell me who those people are?"

                _I don't know_ she wanted to say. The room shifted, and Dave blurred, turning into a red smear across her vision. Red coif, red cape, the tip of his shattered sword resting on his shoulder.

                Rose shivered uncomfortably in the sweat-soaked sheets of her bed. The voice that left her mouth was not her own.

                "They were... kids that I once knew."

                _They were kids that I once knew._

 

\-------------

III.

                While the fever had dissipated the dreams had not, and Rose found herself sleepless through the early hours of the night, bruises outlining the delicate form of her eyes. Waking dreams plagued her vision; thin, spindly figures darting in and out of the shadows in the corner of her eyes. Hallucinations, her mind said. She was tired, she was ill, these were only manifestations of her subconscious mind trying to relieve the draining fatigue she felt.  But something writhed in her chest, a gurgle that sat like a bloated corpse in the back of her mind.

                She sat up in her bed, paper skin stretched over a fishbone frame, and blinked owlishly in the darkness. She squinted her eyes, but her vision refused to focus. Another image was superimposed on the familiar confines of her bedroom. A city, she saw, bricks lining the streets, purple buildings jutting into the sunless sky.

                The closet door creaked in the silence; the distance between it and the bed seemed exponentially farther in the dark. Her heart stopped when she saw a hand emerge from the fathomless depths of the black, segmented fingers wrapping around the pristine frame.

                Her first thought was a dog, but the figure stood, towering in the tiny confines of her bedroom. Its eyes were bone white, narrowed in hate with thin scar snaking through the right. A flash of metal caught her eye, a sword, a cheap piece of shit rammed straight though the solid muscle of its chest. Rose opened her mouth to yell, but the dog-thing beat her to it, opening its fanged maw to scream in screeching, animal tones that made the hairs on her neck stand straight up and set her trembling in fear. Wings spread and  claws extended, it charged at the bed, and Rose scrambled furiously, panting, her pulse fluttering like a hummingbird as she reached blindly for the edge. The sword left its body with a wet _shlick,_ blood spraying across the wall.  She tumbled off the bed, falling, hitting the carpet hard; she briefly wondered if she would shatter like porcelain, like glass. Anticipation cut through her veins and seared her cold flesh, the heat bringing a hint of pink to her otherwise pallid complexion.

                Seconds passed, but nothing happened; she raised her head to see the demon had vanished, nothing left except for the afterimage of flashing jaws and crimson burned onto the backs of her eyelids.

                _They make me feel I'm falling down_

 _They make me feel I'm falling down._

\--------------

IV.

                _"_ -Did they seem real to you?"

                Rose bristled.

                "I have looked at the evidence in the most empirical manner I could muster. The figures do not change, they have personalities, they interact with the environment. They are not _too_ real for hallucinations, they are, in fact, real. And none of your attempts to instill seeds of doubt in my mind will do anything else to convince me.

                The psychiatrist merely raised an eyebrow at the wafer-thin figure before her, a quiet challenge to her steely resolve.

                "Let's talk about the scratches, Rose. How did you get them? People often injure themselves in fits of psychosis brought upon by insomnia or illness-"

                "They are not self-inflicted."

                "Your brother told me that you were alone in the bathroom, then you emerged covered in scratches."

                "Dave is a masterful manipulator of words."

                "He's worried about you."

                "He is acting in his ill-defined notion of irony."

                "Your mother is worried about you."

                "She is being characteristically over-the-top in sending me to a mental health professional." Rose pressed her lips together until they ran bloodless, blending into the bleached white of her skin.

                "What about your friends?"

                "Non-existent."

                Silence.

                "Why did you scratch yourself, Rose?"

"It was not me."

                She thought it was nice of the psychiatrist to lean forward incrementally, as if she were truly interested, as if Rose were not one of thousands of individuals who had sullied the couch with their mundane machinations.

                "Then who?"

                Rose's tongue darted out to wet her chapped lips.

                "I don't know."

                _I can say it but you won't believe me._

 _You say you do but you can't deceive me._

\------------------

V.

                The dream world began to seep into her every day, phantasmagoric images of a darkened purple city or a Technicolor wonder of a planet light and rainwater danced around her head. She did not discuss them with the psychiatrist, and eventually she was left alone, her fever subsided, and the brooding, festering darkness left her thoughts. It was almost pleasant, this insight into another world, this ability to see something no one else could.

                It was a Saturday: warm, breezy, the sky above her a limitless swath of blue. She sat in the shade of a great oak tree, the knitting needles clasped in her deft fingers. Unburdened by responsibilities, she let the rhythmic clinks of metal lull her into a relaxed state, until the combination of heat and wind lulled her to sleep in the open space.

 

                She awoke to a caliginous sky, the stars faint in the light of the full moon overhead. Her needles were there, clenched tightly in her shredded palms, the exposed sinew of her hands glistening in the ashen light. Thick rivulets of red streamed from the deep slashes across her upper arms, and her summer dress was gone, replaced with a black shirt and a deep purple skirt, torn ragged at the bottom.  She was no longer languishing under the oak tree but stood in a clearing, surrounded on all sides by the oppressive, colorless night. There was a lake in the center, the surface smooth and undisturbed, and when she gazed upon her reflection she thought she had become a ghost, her hair shock-white and skin a bloodless granite.

                Clothes that were not hers, in a part of the forest she did not recognize. The needles in her hand were warm despite the deathly chill of her skin, purple sparks occasionally winding down their lengths.

                She threw them to the ground, grabbing at her ghostly locks, and screamed a challenge to the heavens, wordless frustration echoing in the desolate forest. The ground rumbled in response, the tree roots rising from their earthy confines to writhe in the open air. Their lithe forms trapped her injured wrists, and her screams grew more desperate, laced with fear and anger and a hot, roiling hatred.

                They grew invasive, scraping against her skin as they slipped underneath her shirt. Her thrashing did little to dissuade them, and they slid over her body possessively, greedily; the voice from her dreams rose from the sundered land, the guttural noise loud and clear over her hysterical screech. Her eyes flew open and the lake stared back, yellowed sclera and a thin slice of pupil,  heavy draconian gaze focused intently upon her.

                 Her screams were cut off as the roots squeezed, their gnarled surfaces like sandpaper against her skin and the stars winked out one by one as her vision darkened and her limbs went slack-

 

                She jerked violently from her sleep, the memories of her nightmare vivid in her thoughts as she tried to will herself to stop shaking. The sun shone brightly in the late-afternoon sky, contrasting the blackness of her mood, and she rose from her contorted slump, the rough surface of the tree causing her pulse to race in disgust.

                She had to clamp a hand over her mouth to stop from screaming when she saw the lines of black under her wrist where a root had held her, spread like ink in the spider web pattern of her veins.

                _Did you touch them, did you hold them?_

 _Did they follow you to town?_

\------------------

VI.

                She sat under the spray of the shower for hours, fully clothed, the scalding water failing to remove the stain of black beneath her skin or the dirty, soiled feeling on her soul.

                "Rose, no amount of hot water is going to make you any less of a frigid bitch, can you not use all that shit up I kind of need to bathe too." Dave bellowed from outside the bathroom door. Rose stayed curled under the relentless stream, motionless.

                The soft whine of well-oiled hinges marked his entrance, and Dave sat on the toilet seat, the looseness in his limbs contrary to the seriousness in his eyes.  Rose made no move to acknowledge his presence, and Dave didn't offer any words of comfort, the two of them gridlocked under their cool detachment, their ironic facades. When he spoke, Dave's voice was as nonchalant as could be, smooth like wet plaster, frescoed with a detailed and elaborate image of him not giving a fuck.

                "Are you still having nightmares?"

                Rose gave an affirmative grunt from the shower, the first signs of life since she'd returned from her outdoor excursion.

                "Will you tell me about them?"

                "No."

                Her sight betrayed her, the lavender shades of the bathroom gradating to the vermillion interior of Derse's moon; more specifically, Dave's tower. Her form is perched on the great windowsill, Dave beside her as they look out into the void, squid-like shapes swimming in the cosmic ocean. The eye is there, watching her, but it lacks the frightening quality she remembered. Instead her palms sweat from the suicide mission she has undertaken, the thin captchalogue card bearing the yin-yang symbol causing dread to pool like curdled milk in her stomach.

 _Tell me everything that happened-_

                _Tell me everything you saw._  

                "Rose, wake up!"

                A dream, then.

                Dave was under the torrent as well, the water plastering his hair to his head and soaking through his flimsy long-sleeved shirt as he shook Rose's shoulders back and forth. Rose blinked groggily at him, the image of him in the violet Dersite uniform clear and defined before evaporating like steam into the foggy air.

                He exhaled in relief as she came to. "Fuck."

                They weren't alone in the bathroom, however. Rose saw the angled figure appear from behind the shower curtain, watched her crouch beside the bathtub, skin the color of a cloudy day, coal black hair neatly styled about the two candy-corn colored horns on her head. A simple black shirt, emblazoned with the astrological symbol for Virgo, clung to her skinny frame, and Rose's mouth went dry as she looked at her, concern evident in her goldenrod eyes. She shifted from foot to foot, seeming to mull over the words before she spoke, each one carefully emphasized, cherry-picked from a vast vocabulary.

                "I'm sorry to trouble your fictitious domestic residence with my intrusions, but it is imperative that you try and arouse yourself from this slumber, Rose Lalonde."

                She gaped openly at the alien figure before her, bemused but not surprised at the way Dave completely ignored the monster adjacent to him. The horned girl drew closer, and Rose could see beads of condensation running down her gunmetal hide.

                "Rose? Are you able to respond to my request?"

                " _Who are you?_ -"

                Her words were cut short by a sudden splitting pain in her forehead. Rose cried out, clawing at the space above her eyes as she flailed wildly in Dave's grip. Her nails left thin crescent cuts in her skin, black streaming from the deep incisions. Dave shouted as the liquid flowed like ink down her face, swirling in the heated bathwater like viscous oil. She collapsed in her brother's arms, Dave calling for help as Kanaya Maryam looked upon her unconscious form with alarm.

                _Was there one you saw too clearly?_

 _Did they seem too real to you?_

 _\----------------_

VII.

                She wanted desperately to be alone, to be able to look into the corners of the room and not see that slit pupil gazing back at her. But the darkness followed her, the mass slithering in her wake as she moved around the house in an attempt to throw it off her trail. It was watching her, the eye catching the light like a cat's, bright like polished copper in the dusty attic, the single shaft of tangerine sunlight swallowed by the sable beast like a black hole.

                "Leave me _alone."_ Her voice warbled against her will. The eye merely narrowed in response, a row of serrated teeth flashing from a hole in its side.

                we cannot

                "I can't help you with anything, I'm just a kid."

                you are more than what you are

                She stared resolutely at the seething black, tears streaming from her eyes and a throbbing pain building in the soiled crosshatch of her wrist.

                "What do you want?"

                _descend, seer_

 _descend_

                _are you afraid?_

 _wake up_

 _your path is ready_

 _you are the p i l o t_

 _Rose-_

 _"I don't want to die!"_

                Die? When did they say anything about dying?

                ...

                "I don't want to play anymore!"

                _this false reality cannot hold you_

 _you see_

 _right_

 _through_

 _it_

 _d o n ' t  y o u_

The words distorted the world around her, wrinkling the canvas, the colors dripping like watercolor, running together into a mud-brown slurry against her retinas.

                now

                w a k e

                up

                A dissonant choir of sounds, people- children- that she'd known in another life, in a universe parallel to hers.

                "Rose?"

                The girl was back again; this time her skin glowed with an unearthly light, dampened in places by thick crusts of jade green blood. She placed her angular hands on her shoulders, stared right into her bloodshot violet eyes.

                "Rose it is my job as your patron troll to lead you on the correct path of procedure in order to achieve the desired victorious outcome. However, there is no way you and your friends will succeed if you do not wake up." She wiped at the mess of tears and blackness on Rose's cheeks. "You can see, can you not? That this is not the world you are meant to inhabit?"

                She stared blankly at the squirming shape against the wall, looking straight through the bloody hole in the grey-skinned girl's abdomen. Behind her, the sun sank below the horizon, leaving the attic illuminated only by the bioluminescent being before her.

                "Do I know you?"

                The girl curled her painted lips into a melancholy smile.

                "You did, at one time. You knew many of us, Rose Lalonde."

 _Dead Hearts are everywhere_

 _Dead Hearts are everywhere_

 _\------------------_

VIII.

                It happened again and again, falling sleep only to wake in different places: on the roof, in the forest, in the yard, with no recollection of what had transpired. Every time, the chaotic, fractal pattern of her charcoal veins spread a little further, monochrome skin edging the blackened lines.

                "It keeps happening, Dave."

                "Well I'll sit right here and watch your unconscious ass to make sure you don't get up and fall down all these stairs."

                But even her brother's watchful eye did nothing to explain her apparent teleportation. The first time she awoke, she thought he was playing dumb when he said he didn't remember her asking. She slapped him, hard, across the face and stormed away, his bewildered stare following her out of the room.

                The second time she didn't hit him but she almost wished she had, the glint in his eye broadcasting his thoughts like a chintzy Vegas sign, neon and glaring to her critical eye. _You're still sick, Rose. Maybe even a little crazy._

After the ninth, she had stopped asking, leaving Dave to look warily at her bony, emaciated figure as she sat corpselike in the tomb of her bed.

                A flash of orange distracted her, and the horned girl was back, standing in a silent vigil over her bedside. Hours later, when Rose was roused from her sleep,  streaks of jade green painted her skin, splashes of color on the chalk-white of her epidermis.

                _Now they're all dead hearts to you._

 _Now they're all dead hearts to you._

\------------

IX.

                "You say I'm not of this world."

                you a r e not

                "What do I do." She swallowed. "How do I wake up?"

                _ha_

 _ha_

 _first ask_

 _are you a f r a i d_

"... To die?"

                _to ascend, you must cast off this life_

 _face your_

 _fragile_

 _mortality_

 _._

 _surrender to us_

 _yes, surrender_

The onyx form reached for her, the tentacles stopping just short of contact. The ground rolled like ocean waves under her feet, the walls rippling like a disturbed pond and she was falling, tumbling forward into the endless abyss, swallowed whole by the toothed maw of the horror that had followed her for the past month like a shadow.

                _They were kids that I once knew._

 _They were kids that I once knew._

\---------------

X.

                Rose Lalonde lived through a debilitating illness, isolated from the world in her cavernous household with no one but her brother for company. She grew weak and thin, insomnia ravaging her rationality, sending her careening into a state of psychosis. She spoke of a creature, a great raven blob covered in slick, smooth tentacles, and a talkative girl with a razorblade figure, granite skinned and glow-in-the-dark. Incurable and unexplained, the virulent strain ran amok in her body as she sat lifelessly while the days passed her by.

                .Her eyes saw two worlds at once, the shimmering film of her timeline tearing to reveal the tangled alpha underneath.

                One month after her thirteenth birthday, she disappeared.

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
